Supercomputer maker Appro International today announced that it has landed its first contract with the US Department of Defense and will build and install hybrid CPU-GPU machines that will be deployed in five supercomputer centers that have recently bought quite a lot of gear from Cray.

In the past, Silicon Graphics didn't sell containerized data centers — but the company that swallowed it and took its name nearly two years ago, Rackable Systems, did. And the new SGI is now taking its third stab at the idea.

NASA officials failed to wipe sensitive agency data from computers before releasing them to the public, a violation of procedures that are part of the plan to securely end the Space Shuttle program, an audit released on Tuesday said.

Everyone is expected to be responsible for making informed decisions. IT is no exception. But it usually has the additional task of decking out the entire company with the info they need too – wherever they are and whenever they think they might need it. Sounds fun.

Twitchers among the Reg readership – and there must be a few of you, it's a hobby based on obsessive knowledge of minutiae and enhanced by gadgets – take heed. A massive online database of bird calls has been made available free online for your listening enjoyment.

Sky Songs may have failed, but ISPs are apparently undeterred from having a dabble with streaming music services. Irish ISP Eircom will today launch a range of music bundles starting with free Spotify-style streaming for all of Eircom's broadband subscribers, up to a paid-for option that includes a bundle of 40 MP3s for €12.99. (Ireland is still in the Euro as of press time.)

Online hacktivist collective Anonymous, operating under the banners Operation:Payback and "Operation Avenge Assange" have launched a series of DDoS attacks against organisations and people seen as being opposed to Wikileaks and its spokesman Julian Assange.

The DAB-only Traffic Radio service is to be shut down, leaving literally dozens of drivers stranded. The Highways Agency quango said the UK government will no longer fund the service once the contract expires in August 2011, RadioTodayreports.

A group of top NASA boffins says that current climate models predicting global warming are far too gloomy, and have failed to properly account for an important cooling factor which will come into play as CO2 levels rise.

A PayPal executive said his company's decision to suspend payments to Wikileaks came after the US State Department said the whistle-blower site was engaged in illegal activity. The comment came shortly before PayPal agreed to release the remaining funds in the WikiLeaks fund-raising account.

Selling servers in Europe is no easy task these days, and probably not just because some of the economies in the region are wobbly or crashing. EMEA server buyers have always reacted a little differently when recessions hit, often getting out on the vanguard of where the rest of the world eventually follows. Such was the case with the rapid uptake of so-called open systems - what we now call Unix servers - nearly two decades ago.

Off we trot to the Reg Library for our occasional shufti through the whitepaper section. This week we present a couple of security reports, the first inspired by our own difficulty in researching SSL certs.